Current of Music

Theodor W. Adorno, Current of Music. Oxford: Polity Press, 2009, 480 pp. $35.95 paper (978-0-7456-4286-4), $95.95 hardcover (978-0-7456-4285-7)

Long renowned by Adorno scholars despite its conspicuous absence in his published oeuvre, the chapter drafts and 150 pages of additional memoranda which constitute Current of Music document Theodor Adorno's inaugural project in the United States with Paul Lazarsfeld and the Princeton Radio Research Project from 1938 to 1941. These essays - three of which have appeared previously as truncated articles - also represent Adorno's first writings in English. With a dramatic reduction in the poetic and otherwise combative language for which Adorno is known, their tone reflects more than just the language of his new home. Prompted to put his theoretical ideas on music and mass culture to empirical test, while employed to answer the significantly different question, "Who listens?" Adorno ventures resentfully into the "middle range." Though he periodically maps empirical projects to match blocks of research questions which float about the text, Adorno's experimental islands never achieve the systematic continent of Lazarsfeld's survey method, and often appear patronizing and deliberately naïve, as though designed to highlight the limits of empirical methodology. Beyond these formalities, the inquiry remains squarely within the purview of Adorno's dialectical thought.

In his extensive introduction, Robert Hullot-Kentor sets the book in context as Adorno struggles less with his transition between national cultures than with his transplant from one academic bubble to another. In this story, Lazarsfeld represents the assimilating "academic tycoon" advancing into American intellectual grandeur. In addition to his managerial relation to Adorno, Lazarsfeld's aspirations for the democratic potential of radio render him an intellectual surrogate for Adorno's friend and foil, Walter Benjamin. Thus a dual intrigue...